Hello Linux Geeksters. As you may know, Virtualbox is an free , multi-platform virtualization software created by Oracle, being popular on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. The latest version available is Virtualbox 5.0 Beta 1, which has been released with a huge list of changes.
Changes:
- VMM: improved timing on Solaris hosts with older VT-x hosts without preemption timers
- VBoxManage: when exporting an appliance, support the suppression of MAC addresses, which means they will be always recreated on import, avoiding duplicate MAC addresses for VMs which are imported several times
- USB: added USB traffic capturing
- Made resizing X11 guests work more reliably
- API: block the removal of the current snapshot if it has child snapshots (only relevant for VMs without snapshottable hard disks, their presence always prevented removal), which resulted in VM config corruption
- API: mark VM configs with snapshots but without current snapshot as inaccessible, as this combination is nonsense
- API: fix information for some automatically generated events (only with XPCOM, Windows host was not affected), which caused errors when getting some of the attributes over the webservice
- API: fix crashes in Java API clients using the XPCOM binding, happened with output parameters only
- API: a number of settings (e.g. network settings) can now also be changed when the VM is in saved state
Incomplete list of changes, to be added to Virtualbox 5.0 stable:
- Paravirtualization support for Windows and Linux guests to improve time-keeping accuracy and performance
- Make more instruction set extensions available to the guest when running with hardware-assisted virtualization and nested paging. Among others this includes: SSE 4.1, SSE4.2, AES-NI, POPCNT, RDRAND and RDSEED
- xHCI Controller to support USB 3 devices (requires the Extension Pack)
- Drag and drop support (bidirectional) for Windows, Linux and Solaris guests
- Disk image encryption (requires the Extension Pack)
- GUI: Detach mode: Terminate the GUI but keep the VM running and re-attach to a running VM process
- GUI: VM guest-content scaling support (including 3D acceleration)
- GUI: New User Interface settings page for customizing status-bar, menu-bar and guest-content scaling
- GUI: New Encryption settings tab for customizing encryption options for disk images
- GUI: HiDPI support including application icons and optional unscaled HiDPI output on Mac OS X (including 3D acceleration)
- GUI: Hotplugging support for SATA disks
- New, modular audio architecture for providing a better abstraction of the host audio backends
- USB hard disks
- Support for the NDIS6 networking framework on Windows (default on Vista and later)
In this article I will show you how to install Virtualbox 5.0 Beta 1 on Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn, Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr, Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin, Linux Mint 17.1 Rebecca, Linux Mint 17 Qiana, Linux Mint 13 Maya, Pinguy OS 14.04, Elementary OS 0.3 Freya, Elementary OS 0.2 Luna, Deepin 2014, Peppermint Five, LXLE 14.04, Linux Lite 2 and other Ubuntu derivative systems.
In order to successfully install Virtualbox 5.0 Beta 1 on Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 12.04 and derivative systems, we have to download the deb package from the project’s website and install it via command-line. I prefer gdebi over dpkg due to the fact that it also handles dependencies.
Follow the instructions for your system and architecture exactly, in order to get a successful installation.
How to install Virtualbox 5.0 Beta 1 on Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 and derivative systems:
Instructions for 32 bit systems:
$ sudo apt-get install gdebi
$ wget download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/5.0.0_BETA1/virtualbox-5.0_5.0.0~beta1-99371~Ubuntu~trusty_i386.deb
$ gdebi virtualbox-5.0_5.0.0~beta1-99371~Ubuntu~trusty_i386.deb
Instructions for 64 bit systems:
$ sudo apt-get install gdebi
$ wget download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/5.0.0_BETA1/virtualbox-5.0_5.0.0~beta1-99371~Ubuntu~trusty_amd64.deb
$ gdebi virtualbox-5.0_5.0.0~beta1-99371~Ubuntu~trusty_amd64.deb
How to install Virtualbox 5.0 Beta 1 on Ubuntu 12.04 and derivative systems:
Instructions for 32 bit systems:
$ sudo apt-get install gdebi
$ wget download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/5.0.0_BETA1/virtualbox-5.0_5.0.0~beta1-99371~Ubuntu~precise_i386.deb
$ gdebi virtualbox-5.0_5.0.0~beta1-99371~Ubuntu~precise_i386.deb
Instructions for 64 bit systems:
$ sudo apt-get install gdebi
$ wget download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/5.0.0_BETA1/virtualbox-5.0_5.0.0~beta1-99371~Ubuntu~precise_amd64.deb
$ gdebi virtualbox-5.0_5.0.0~beta1-99371~Ubuntu~precise_amd64.deb
Optional, to remove Virtualbox from either Ubuntu or a derivative system, do:
$ sudo apt-get remove virtualbox-5.0